Searching for the gold

Don Jones runs some of his test samples through a sluice box in his backyard.

The moment Don Jones saw the gold in his pan he knew he was in trouble.

He caught a bad case of gold fever.

The only way to solve his gold-fever problem was to keep looking for more gold.

"I've been playing around with it since I was 14 years old," Jones said.

Mining just seemed to run in the family and Jones, a Green River resident, said his mother recently gave him his grandfather's gold pan. He said a lot of his family members were coal miners or railroad workers.

Although Jones chose a different path when he worked as a PacifiCorp manager for the Northern Utah and Southern Wyoming regio...